


you're right there (where you wanna be)

by kissmeinnewyork



Series: it feels like heaven to me [1]
Category: Pitch Perfect (Movies)
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Humor, Romance, beca mitchell is socially inept, hand holding, super gay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-20 07:21:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14255844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kissmeinnewyork/pseuds/kissmeinnewyork
Summary: “For the record, Becs, I wasn’t lying. I’m still not. If you want to hold my hand, you can. Because I really, really want to hold yours. Like, all the time.” Or, Beca Mitchell is a total, complete and utter idiot, who does things like hold Chloe Beale's hand by accident.





	you're right there (where you wanna be)

**Author's Note:**

> re-upload due to slight change in the draft. this came from a prompt on tumblr which you should definitely follow me on btw (ohbecamitchell.tumblr.com) and leave some kudos/comments maybe xx

Beca’s never been good at small talk.

It’s not that she’s not interested in the weather, or the latest episode of that reality show she doesn’t watch, or how cute someone’s kid is now they’ve started kindergarten. It’s just that she’s _totally not interested at fucking all_ in every single one of those things. Plus, she’s a socially-inept mess of a woman at the best of times. It’s like—she’s one of these people who will inadvertently say something really embarrassing (“Enjoy your meal!” “Thanks, you too!” _FUCK’S_ SAKE) in public and for days and days afterwards she’ll lie in bed staring at the ceiling thinking _oh my god why do you even leave the house why do you even have friends why do you even exist you fucking idiot._

Chloe, on the other hand, is the _queen_ of small talk. It’s like she attended some class on it that Beca didn’t get the memo on, because she floats in and out of conversations with ease, sometimes getting phone numbers and party invites like she’s known the barista in Starbucks or the cashier at the 7Eleven for _years._ People like Chloe. People don’t like Beca, unless they’re insane (cue Jesse Swanson serenading her in the back of a cab in freshman year) or know her better than she usually allows.

Chloe knows Beca better than anyone, really. Chloe even _likes_ Beca, but she’s insane anyway, so that’s a given. But Beca is still totally useless in reciprocating that the feeling is mutual. Just like she’s completely useless at trying to chat to strangers like, _ever._

“My Spanish professor is like, a total dumbass,” Chloe complains loudly as the two of them cross the quad. Beca’s texting and not really paying attention, but Chloe can talk for England so she continues ranting anyway. It’s a pretty sweet deal. Beca’s a better listener than a talker and she’ll listen to Chloe talk for hours about nothing, because for some reason Chloe’s _nothing_ means more to her than anyone else’s. “I don’t even think he can speak Spanish.”

“Hm?” Beca says, scrolling through yet _another_ internship rejection and trying not to look completely bummed about it.

“The other day he made us watch this kid’s video on YouTube of some frogs singing the Spanish alphabet. I mean, I enjoyed it, it was super adorable, but I’ve been doing Spanish since elementary school. You’d think the class material would be a bit more advanced than that, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh, totally.”

“Maybe Juan is his fake name. Maybe he’s actually just some forty-year-old dude with a moustache from Indiana who fancied a major life change.”

“Sounds about right.”

“Oh, and he wears these really weird white leather pants like, every day. They’re not very forgiving round the… you know what. I’ve had an eyeful of fake-Spanish ding-a-ling _way_ too many times for me to be remotely okay with it. Can you report someone for that? I’ll have to look into it. Maybe Stacie will know.”

“You should. You definitely should.”

As Chloe continues to jabber inanely about the state of her Spanish grade and the _totes rigged_ quiz she sat the other week Beca scrolls through her Instagram feed, likes a couple of photos and finds her free hand hanging loosely by her side. She’s not aware of what she’s even doing with it. She barely even realises that she’s subconsciously reaching out for Chloe’s, their hands centimeters apart then suddenly interlocked; it feels so fucking natural that it goes totally under her radar. She probably wouldn’t have noticed—being a socially-inept unobservant wreck and all—if Chloe hadn’t, you know, _pointed it out._

“Um, Beca?” Chloe asks incredulously. When she finally takes her eyes away from her phone at the mention of her name, Chloe raises their now intertwined hands as an extension to her question.

“Shit!” Beca exclaims, quickly retracting her hand back, “Oh my god, I didn’t realise—“

“No, relax, Becs, it’s okay—“

“Oh my god, that’s so embarrassing,” Beca says quickly, realising that she’s sweating and her heartbeat has fluctuated to way beyond a normal rate. Chloe looks annoyingly cool about the whole thing. Like she didn’t just _hold her hand in public._ True, Beca’s been in the midst of way more humiliating excruciating escapades in the past (go figure) but this is _Chloe,_ and Chloe is—

Well, she’s not sure what Chloe is, or what she wants her to be, and they talk so much but never about what they actually _are._ And she’s definitely stuck her foot in it this time, because who the _fuck_ accidentally holds someone’s hand?

(It’s kind of frightening, because as well as everything else, Beca’s really struggled with intimacy. Big romcom style kiss at the ICCAs aside, she’s always been ridiculously private about all her relationships—it took her _months_ to let Jesse hold her hand in public. She’s not even in a relationship with Chloe.)

“No, it really wasn’t,” Chloe smiles—that goddamn _smile_ —and raises an eyebrow bemusedly. “It was kind of… cute actually.”

“I’m just gonna, you know,” Beca says, already edging off away to the edge of the quad. She points some extremely awkward finger guns in Chloe’s direction. Yep. Really. “ _Crawlunderarockanddie._ Sweet! I’ll see you, like, around? Maybe?”

Chloe folds her arms. She has to raise her voice because Beca’s already managed to escape halfway across campus, running _physically_ for the first time in her life but doing the same boring shit with her problems. “We live together, so I’ll probably just see you when you come home.”

“Not if I flee the country!” Beca yells back. She forces herself into a near-sprint until Chloe is a performing arts flash mob and a plant fair behind her and she can no longer see her flame of hair, not even as a blur in the distance. Walking into the foyer of the library, Beca has to physically fight the urge to slam her head into a wall.

She’s a dork. The biggest dork in the whole of the States, possibly the world. At least she can count _literally running away_ onto her list of terrible coping mechanisms, because she’s totally going to have to keep running away from Chloe for the rest of her life now.

(It actually kind of sucks. Because—she didn’t accidentally hold Chloe’s hand completely by _accident._ That’s not the kind of thing Beca does. It’s because… well, she might be in love with her best friend, but of course she’s useless at admitting and talking about that sort of thing. So she runs away instead. Some things never change.)

-x-

She ends up avoiding Chloe in any intimate, one-to-one capacity for nine days.

It’s been difficult in three distinct ways:

One, they live together.

Two, they run the Bella’s together

And three, before Beca made an idiot of herself, they spent pretty much every spare moment they had together. Apparently they do a lot of shit together. Way more than Beca originally thought.

Also, avoiding Chloe is _hard._ Not just on an emotional level—which stings, thinking she’s fucked one of the only good things life right up—but also that girl has _connections._ On Friday Beca actually ran into the bathroom of the campus café after seeing Chloe come through the door and laugh with the manager. She’d sat in there with her legs tucked up to her chest for almost twenty minutes, wondering if this is what her life is now. God, why can’t she just be _normal?_

“Okay, BM,” Fat Amy starts upon entering the room they share and finding Beca lying on her bed, face down, for at least the fifth time this week. She sits on her bed, her ass dipping the mattress, forcing Beca to turn round and look at her. Amy pats her butt affectionately. “What the hell is up with you? You’ve been acting like you’ve just been told you’ve got chlamydia all week. Unless—if that’s the reason, you can get antibiotics for that shit now, totally flushes you out.”

Beca narrows her eyes, but she’s not surprised enough to manage more of a reaction than that. “Gross.”

Amy shrugs. “I’m serious, though. You’ve been a total downer lately. Chloe thinks you’ve been avoiding her. Actually…” Amy pauses, stroking an imaginary beard, “Have you got _chlo-_ mydia?”

Beca gapes.

“Oh, don’t give me that, Mitchell,” Amy says, reaching across and closing Beca’s swinging jaw. “We all know you’ve had the hots for each other since, like, forever. We’ve got a sweepstake on it.”

“A sweepstake?” Beca screeches, affronted, “You’ve been betting on my life? My _actual_ real life? And you haven’t let me in on it so I can tactically reap the rewards?”

“Chloe’s in on it too,” Amy says, to Beca’s surprise, silencing her previous protests. “She was pretty drunk when she said it, but she placed quite a huge bet on you two _getting it on_ before the semester is over. Wink wink.”

This is all news to Beca. The whole _her and Chloe_ thing was supposed to be quiet and unspoken, the will-they won’t-they that may never come to fruition. She never thought Chloe was that vocal about their relationship, whatever that is. They’re just Beca and Chloe. Maybe they’ve both been too unwilling to push the other too far when really, it’s not that complicated at all. “How much?”

“That would be telling!” Amy scolds, but then mouths _two million bucks._ Bitch. “Anyway. What this conversation has told me is that you’re not alarmed or displeased at the prospect of banging everybody’s—or at least _yours,_ Ron Weasley still owns my heart—ginger, so what’s got in your grill? Was there a collision involving your foot somehow going straight in your mouth? Shit hitting fans? Etcetera?”

Beca groans loudly, closing her eyes. Amy’s too fucking good at knowing every single detail about her life despite not telling her anything about it, so there’s no point in hiding it now. “Something in that area may have happened. Uh, god, this is embarrassing. We were walking, and then there was this thing, where I kind of accidentally…”

“Accidentally what?”

“Let me finish!” Beca says, whacking Amy on the arm, before returning back to the miserable chain of events. Amy mimes zipping her lips, gesturing with her hand to proceed. “I may have accidentally. Well. Held her hand.”

“Held _her_ hand?” Amy shouts so loudly Beca’s sure her family in Tasmania probably heard her, “You accidentally _held her hand?_ This is what all this has been about? _Holding hands?_ I thought you were going to say you’d _accidentally_ banged that hot Brazilian exchange student in my sociology class then _accidentally_ like, snapped his dick off while you were doing it very enthusiastically on a desk in the chemistry lab which _accidentally_ might have caught on fire!” Amy laughs uneasily, “Which definitely… wasn’t me, by the way. I have no idea how that chemistry lab caught on fire. It might have been that. Could have been something else.”

“Right,” Beca says, elongating the word sceptically, “And I know, it’s stupid, _I’m_ stupid. But I haven’t talked to her in over a week and… I don’t know how to, now, I don’t think. Geez, I’m a mess.”

Amy hums loudly. “Just talk to her, bitch. You’re Beca and Chloe. Together you’re—“

“ _Bloe,_ yes Amy, thank you—“

“And you can’t have a blowie with just one person, unless you’re an extremely talented contortionist. You belong together.” Amy does a very unsavoury mime that Beca hopes she never has to see again. “See?”

Beca reaches out, desperately trying to stop Amy from doing the mime again for clarification. Sometimes she wonders why she’s best friends with this hot mess. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll talk to her. But I’ve got this, like, really important paper due tomorrow so—“

“Don’t even try,” Amy says, roughly hauling Beca up from the duvet with one arm, until she’s sat next to her and no longer lying down. It’s so swift Beca’s momentarily stunned by Amy’s dexterity. “You can tell her that you’re an idiot, which she knows but tell her anyway. Then you can kiss and make-up. As loud as you want. I’m serious. I’ve already got plans with someone who definitely _isn’t_ a Brazilian exchange student so you two can have hot lesbian sex all night—“

“And that’s enough!” Beca says, hand reaching out to clamp over Fat Amy’s mouth before she can say anymore. It somehow descends into a tickle fight. A lot of their conversations end in tickle fights, for some reason.

(Amy always wins.)

-x-

Chloe volunteers running an after school choir at a local elementary school on Tuesdays so its past six by the time she comes back, the rest of the girls nowhere to be seen (other than Amy waiting eagerly for a post-chat lowdown in their bedroom). Beca paces up and down the kitchen, her palms sweating. It really shouldn’t be this nerve-wracking, or nauseating, or anything really. She pauses to nearly vomit in the sink a couple of times.

It was never this anxiety-inducing with Jesse. With Jesse there was never really anything at all, but she thought that was how relationships were _supposed_ to be; she’s hardly an expert. But it’s different with Chloe. It’s always been different with Chloe.

Bang on six fifteen the front door clicks open, Chloe loudly sighing as she drags a plastic box of her kid’s sheet music from the steps to the living room. She throws her keys on the coffee table and it’s only then that she sees Beca, standing awkwardly in the entranceway to the kitchen.

“Oh!” Chloe says brightly, “Hi!”

“Yeah,” Beca responds, pulling at the sleeves of her shirt. “Hey, Chlo.”

Chloe walks over, decreasing the space between them. She runs a hand through her hair, knotted by the wind. She’s wearing a really cute blouse. Well, it’s not Beca’s style at _all,_ but Chloe looks cute in it. “Something up? You’ve been a little… distant, the last few days.”

Well. Yeah. That’s one word for her just being an asshole. “Okay, about that.” She takes a deep breath, looking at the ceiling. “I’m just an idiot. Really. Like, this whole thing has been a great, big exercise in showing you how much of an idiot I really am. Truly. I don’t know how any of you begin to deal with this level of sheer idiocy.”

Chloe laughs, like she always does, like there’s a shoal of butterflies trapped in her ribcage and they’re breaking through into the room, filling it with colour. Beca’s a hundred shades of gray but Chloe’s this huge fuck-off rainbow like, all the time, and maybe Beca’s finally realising that she can’t live without that messy haze of reds and blues and purples and greens.

“Is this you apologising to me for avoiding me, even though I said that holding my hand was totally okay?”

Beca grimaces, itching her earlobe. “Maybe?”

Chloe laughs again, biting her lip. “For the record, Becs, I wasn’t lying. I’m still not. If you want to hold my hand, you can. Because I really, really want to hold yours. Like, all the time.”

A warmth spreads out across Beca’s chest and she feels a smile, one of those crazy, unconscious ones she only gets when she’s deliriously happy, tugging at her lips. “That’s pretty gay, dude.”

“I know, right? Super gay,” Chloe says, inching closer and closer, “And maybe we could do other, like, super gay things, you know—“

Beca cuts her off, her words lost in her mouth as her lips cover hers. Beca smiles into her kiss, because she’s so damn happy, her gut filled with more fireworks than a July fourth sky. Chloe’s lips taste like strawberries. It’s kind of perfect.

When they break for air Chloe’s hands are entangled in Beca’s hair and she’s wearing a near mirror-image of Beca’s unabridged smile, giddy and content.

“Now, I just wanted to double check,” Chloe whispers against Beca’s lips, “That wasn’t an accident right?”

“Shut up, weirdo,” Beca says, and kisses her again.

And again.


End file.
